alt Hacker NewsThis is exactly why I’m so uninterested in driving en EV. I usually word it as “I don’t want to drive a computer”, but the reality is that I don’t want to be on the wrong end of the power imbalance that comes from this amount of complexity.
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Many modern ford cars have 6 CAN buses. ICE cars are not simpler. The tech _has_ been beaten with the hammer of incremental improvement for a long time, but ICE cars are not less computer controlled. If anything ice engines require many more "computers" and sensors to be efficient
EV and "driving a computer" are orthogonal
chances are that you are driving an ICE computer, with all the problems driving a computer comes with.
the EV itself is simpler than ICE is. fewer moving parts, and short supply chains once you actually have the thing.
how much complexity goes into making and supplying your gas?
Teslas are dead simple, to the point where people are putting Tesla anything in virtually anything you can think of - classic cars, random sedans, you name it.
There’s also that guy on YouTube who updated the electricals in his original Model S with electricals from a 10 years later Model 3 Highland just by buying spare parts, and it was pretty doable with fairly basic and limited tools/public information.
So the complexity in this article is just a BMW/PHEV thing, not an EV thing.
PHEV in the title is plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. Different from a pure EV.
In principle and EV car should be much simpler than an ICE car. It seems they are adding a lot of extra stuff that's not really necessary.
The article points out that it’s specificity BMW making this hard and expensive.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone.
If you own a BMW you’ll be dropping $5k on a repair someday. It’s a matter of when not if. That’s why most people lease them and move on to the next one.
You're blaming the wrong thing. EVs are ultimately much, much simpler than ICE cars, it's just that certain manufacturers are taking this opportunity to turn their cars into elaborate scams.
Everything is a computer these days, but that doesn't mean that they have to be needlessly complicated. I think EVs are great, but I won't be buying one until they start selling cheap, simple ones.
This seems like more of a BMW issue than EV. On my E46 and E39 there's a pyrotechnic fuse on the negative battery terminal. It's somewhere around $400 in parts to replace. It's only gotten more expensive and more complex with their newer ICE cars.
Back in the 80s and 90s Ford's solution was a reusable inertia switch.
Absolutely, also I'm not stupid rich and most are not but I witness how much they spend more on services and repair that I can very very easily do on my "stupid" gasoline car myself. I buy my used cars for 5k and a used ev is like 20k-25k where I live so I on purchase save the first 20k. The gas cost I save with lower insurance and service/repair costs easily. So it's juat a waste of money in my opinion and a bit of an itelligence test.
EVs are not complicated.
Modern carmakers might make them complicated, and you're well within your right to avoid those, but in general electronic propulsion is pretty simple. The problem is car manufacturing is a very expensive industry that's extremely difficult to disrupt, so incumbents aren't really worried about staying ahead of hungry competitors.
Go look at small-scale PEVs - ebikes, scooters, unicycles, etc. A huge, huge range of players making every possible variation under the sun, with simple designs and extremely low costs. This is what the car space is missing out on, because of regulations etc owing to their larger size and much higher danger levels that entails. I suspect many places have regulations that largely exclude smaller, simpler cars from being viable as well.